The financial problems
of several of Washington's museums has got me thinking more about
museums than I usually do. I don't rank as a museum expert, still
I suspect I'm somewhere in the middle of the pack of those the
experts are trying to attract. I love some museums, couldn't
care less about others, and prefer to have fun on a Saturday
afternoon rather than engage in premeditated acts of somber self-education.

There are plenty
of troubled museums around the country that need more people
like me. But they don't seem to have the touch. Are museums -
like daily newspapers with their declining circulation - simply
victims of changing technology and public tastes? Will television
and the Internet damage the Louvre as well as the Washington
Post? Or are museum designers and curators simply not reacting
well enough to the changes around them?

For example, last
fall I went to see the new American Indian Museum and was sadly
disappointed. The post-modernists, it appeared, had even infiltrated
the ranks of "community curators" and created exhibits
that seemed the work of magazine cover designers. One felt endlessly
trapped in introductions to something without ever getting to
the real thing.

The verbal abstractions
were numbing, the repetition tedious, and the lack of good stories
odd, given their role in Indian culture.

Here was yet another
building filled with annoying verbiage and distracting design
intended to instruct you on how you should feel about something
without giving you a chance to actually feel it. On the other
hand, a couple of months later I went to an exhibit of Dutch
art at the National Gallery and every label told me something
interesting and useful about the painting next to it without
ever being patronizing or dully didactic and I left not only
feeling good but knowing more. The lack of pretentious abstractions
and snooty adjectives didn't hurt.

My own museum experience
started with the stuffed animals at the Smithsonian Museum of
Natural History and was later encouraged by lightning flashes
and crashes and other scientific paraphernalia at the Franklin
Institute in Philadelphia, where I learned to call such places
'muzims.' Decades before computer games there was also a black
coupe you could get into and "drive" into the movie
being shown in front of you. You turned the wheel and braked
and at the end received a punch card that told you whether you
had an accident or not. Best of all you didn't need a license,
which was, for me, still years away.

I learned to like
things that were life sized whether they were stegasauri or steam
engines. I looked for surprises often concealed among the stodgier
adult matter. I liked being taken someplace else. . . to another
land or a another time or to outer space. Sometimes after looking
at the tigers or the baboons, I would stare at the backdrop of
the diorama and imagine myself on that same veldt with those
same creatures. Best of all, I liked the way the props all around
me helped me imagine new things.

I still do. While
at an impressionist exhibit at the Phillips Collection a friend,
finished with her tour, handed me her taped guide machine. I
don't care for these things, in part because they intrude on
my reveries, but I took the machine and went into a room of abstract
paintings by Rothko. I sat down on a bench and - staring at the
huge mass of color before me - turned on the tape machine as
it talked about the paintings downstairs. The resulting hallucinations
were quite remarkable as I blended visual expressionism with
aural impressionism. But how in the world do you justify such
nonsense to a highly skilled curator?

While serving as
Washington correspondent for the Illustrated London News, I once
spent a week in the National Air and Space Museum. It would soon
become the most visited museum in the world. Air & Space
had been planned and built by engineers instead of by museum
people and it was the only such institution in Washington that
had opened three days early and a half million dollars under
budget.

As I wandered about,
I began noticing that the people who created this museum enjoyed
it as much as I did. There was a mini-exhibit about the starship
Enterprise. And there was a pie tin from the Frisbee Pie Company
of Bridgeport, CT. The legend read: "Flown upside down,
the tins were not as stable as modern plastic discs and their
flights were highly unpredictable, but they did fly." I
mentioned this to the deputy director, Melvin Zisfein. He immediately
got up from his desk, went to the closet, pulled out a Frisbee,
and then commenced to give me a pleasant lecture on the aerodynamics
of the device. Later, I asked an official something about the
DC-3, one of my favorites. He opened a big lateral file and as
I looked down at the folders I noticed some model plane kits
shoved amongst the data, waiting for someone to open them up
and start building something over lunch. Then, at the end of
the week, I interviewed the director, Noel Hinners, boldly remarking
at one point that I had found something almost childlike in the
museum. He was not bothered in the slightest but said, "There
is nothing more stultifying than being pushed into the common
conception of adulthood. If enthusiasm, hopes and dreams are
associated with childhood, I hope we never grow out of them."

I remembered thinking:
what other director of anything in Washington DC would say something
like that?

I raised another
risky point. We are taught that all art is done by artists. But
in the air and space museum I found myself feeling that I was
looking at beauty as well as technology. I asked Hinners if he
had ever thought of Air & Space as an art museum. He replied,
"To many of us, internally, airplanes and rockets - they're
beautiful. You don't look at them as pieces of metal, but as
a culmination of a challenge to do something."

And when that something
is flying through space you come eventually to the rules of nature's
own aesthetic in which all beauty has a purpose. The curator
Walter Hopps agreed, telling me that the museum had "more
aesthetic appeal to most people than most art museums do for
most people. I think there is something very atavistic about
it. One of the root themes in art is quest - exploration."

Today, the Air &
Space Museum has two thirds more visitors than the Louvre or
the British Museum. Both of the latter, incidentally, are roughly
at a par with the Smithsonian's stuffed animal museum (AKA the
Museum of Natural History) and its museum of trains, cars, and
other large and interesting things from our past (AKA the Museum
of American History).

Part of the problem
today with many museums is that their directors are trained to
do things like raise money, please major donors, express major
themes, and show how socially conscious and profound they are.
They lack the dramatic instincts of an entertainer, the good
words of a writer, or the wisdom of a photographer who knows
that if a picture is right, it doesn't even need any words.

Fortunately, I have
a partial cure, which is to create museum advisory boards of
12 year olds - i.e. those most likely to enthuse about or get
bored with exhibitions. After all, you can only pander to faux
intellectuals and sober adults as long as you have sufficient
things that are big enough, different enough, curious enough,
or enjoyable enough to entice the 12-year-olds they have brought
along or who happen to be in the room bothering them.

It can be educational
but it must also be interesting. For example, I happily recall
an 18th century house at Strawberry Bank that had each room fitted
out for a different period of the structure's existence, ending
with a 1950s parlor complete with an early television set. History
in the house wasn't trapped in a time ghetto but took us on its
own trip as we went from room to room.

So here are some
of the suggestions for struggling museums that I would make if
I were still twelve years old and served on one of these advisory
committees:

- It's not the wrapping
that counts. It's the present inside. Too much money has been
blown creating the architectural gift wrapping of museums. I
don't care what a museum looks like on the outside. After all,
I'm paying to go in, not to stand on the sidewalk. Besides, once
an architect does something, you're stuck with it. You can't
take it down from the wall and put it into storage. Spend your
money on the stuff inside.

- The interior of
the building should also work for the visitor and not the architect.
Tens of millions of dollars have been wasted making huge spaces
that just delay or confound the visitor's approach to objects
and their stories.

- The best museums
are like the best attics. Everywhere you look there's something
worth looking at.

- If you want to
know how good an exhibit is, listen to it. The best exhibits
get people talking and so the room will be noticeably louder.

- Take me somewhere.
One of my favorite museums is the Tenement Museum in New York
City. From the moment you step into the dark first floor hallway
until you leave you are carried into that building's past. The
Churchill bunker in London is the same way. Not just a visit
but a voyage.

- In some house museums
you wouldn't be surprised if the former owner suddenly walked
through the pantry door; in others you might as well be in just
another antique shop. Three of my favorite house museums are
right here in Washington. In each case it is the ghosts' own
contributions that make them work: the Frederic Douglass' little
shed he called his "growlery," the beer parlor in brewmaster
Christian Heurich's mansion, the mike for a seminal talk to the
nation in Woodrow Wilson's home along with an icebox in the kitchen
standing near one of the first refrigerators. Materials that
connect the exhibits to real experience.

- Have some big things
and put them in spaces that make them seem natural rather than
captured objects. Zoos know this and even have a name for their
larger creatures. They call them "charisimatic mammals."
All museums need charismatic objects.

- Have lots of places
where you can sit and think about what you are seeing while feeling
what it would be like to have it in your own living room. A few
uncomfortable benches in the middle of the room aren't enough.

- Have places where
you can sit and read something about what you're seeing.

- Don't have too
many small things. The eye tires of endless pots and pieces of
jewelry behind glass.

- If you need to
prove how culturally sensitive you are, show it with the exhibit
and not with a badly written label.

- Don't tell me how
to feel about something. Let me discover it for myself.

- There need to be
lots of stories. Much of what we learn is by anecdote, not by
carefully constructed outline and timeline.

- Design should never
interfere with, nor replace, a good story.

- Have some buttons
to push that cause things to happen. And make sure that they
work.

- Make your exhibition
less like a cathedral or a classroom and more like a fair.